Everybody wants to give Miles a hard time about playing slow. They said he played slow because he could not play fast. Sure, he wasn’t Dizzy Gillespie. He wasn’t going to play bop that way, and he would not be the Coltrane to Dizzy’s Bird. Still, Miles knew what he was doing. He expressed a world of soul in those notes. One phrase draws you into the next. Maybe that’s the heroin talking or maybe it’s a realization by Miles that he had to make his thing work rather than trying to make himself fit into somebody else’s thing.
He knew his limitations is what I guess I am trying to say, and I’m just going to go right head and make a huge metaphorical leap into politics. Our public figures keep trying to convince us that we are without limits as a country. They keep telling us that, once elected – or re-elected – they will bring the manufacturing jobs back. The truth is that those jobs are not coming back. They tell us market based solution will solve our social problems when market based solutions are often at the root of the problems. Whether they mean to or not, our political leadership is trying to have us believe that we are somehow unique in the history of civilization in that we are not restrained in the way that every society prior to us has been.
Which is in direct conflict with the solution at the basis of our government. Our Constitution is framed around the idea that people suck. We will fail. We will have bad ideas and be unable to agree on anything and have to be forced to make decisions anyway. That’s what checks and balances and representative democracy are all about. They are not about an economic system which had only been invented in the same year as the drafting of the Constitution. The freedoms that document secure are not the freedoms of purchase and consumption, they are the freedoms to contribute and provide. For ourselves, our communities, and our prosperity (meaning kids.)